The invention relates to an assembly for automatically securing at least one mail item on a transport tray, comprising the mail item and the transport tray, on which the mail item can be placed, and a fixing arrangement designed to secure the mail item to the transport tray. The invention additionally relates to a method for automatically securing a mail item, with a fixing arrangement designed to secure the mail item to a transport tray on which the mail item can be placed.
In general, a centre for handling, storing, sorting and/or sending mail items used by a logistics, postal, shipping, or transport company and/or airport is understood to be a parcel centre, also referred to as a shipping centre, main distribution centre (HUB), or freight centre and will be referred to hereinafter only as a parcel centre or shipping centre. Within the scope of the invention, mail items are any type of portable goods, for example letters, parcels, freight goods, freight shipments, freight units, packages or the like. A parcel centre is often structured such that mail items firstly can be delivered in a delivery area, for example by lorry or by rail. For simpler handling, a plurality of mail items are in many cases placed on a pallet, for example a Europool pallet, adjacently and/or stacked on top of one another.
By means of a forklift truck or the like, the pallets can be unloaded from the lorry in the delivery area and can be set down within the shipment centre on a transport trolley movable in a manually actuatable manner or by means of a tractor unit. The pallets can be moved by means of the transport trolley to a sorting facility for sorting the mail items, for example on the basis of a target region. Alternatively, the pallets can be stored in an interim storage arrangement often embodied as a high-bay warehouse so as to perform the sorting of the mail items at a subsequent moment in time. On account of the physically increasingly larger shipping centres, sorting facilities or high-bay warehouses are often arranged at a distance of a few hundred meters from the delivery region.
Such a transport of a pallet within the shipping centre generally requires an operator, either for the manually actuatable transport trolley or for the tractor unit. The transport between lorry and sorting facility or interim storage arrangement is thus complex and also costly. In addition, the mail items provided on the pallet are in many cases only insufficiently or not at all secured against slipping and loss. In this regard, it is not unusual for mail items to fall off from the pallet over the transport path, which measures a few hundred meters in length. The mail items that fall off are in many cases damaged and reach their addressees late or not at all, which involves a costly replacement of the mail items or, in the case of leaked liquids, even results in time-consuming and costly fire brigade operations.